You must log in or register to comment.
If a story doesn’t have a satisfying conclusion, then I would say starting the story is pointless.
I think both “the show had 5 great seasons but a terrible ending” is as bad as “the show has 3 bad seasons but the last 2 are great!” are equally bad and reasons that I would not watch something.
It’s not like there aren’t hundreds of other options.
Babylon 5 was a great show… with this caveat:
-
Season 1 is slow and you won’t know how important it is until you watch 2, 3, 4.
-
Season 4 is the single best season of sci fi television ever produced, but you have to have seen 2 and 3 to fully appreciate it.
-
The reason Season 4 is amazing is because they didn’t know they were getting a Season 5 so they stuffed 2 seasons worth of television into 1.
-
Then they got renewed for Season 5 by a different network and were like “Season 5… um… yeah! We totally have a plan for that… Yeah… totally ready to go.”
-
Meanwhile you have BNA:Brand New Animal, A show with an ending so bad it taints everything that leads up to it. I have never seen a show undermine its own message like that.
Every single person of note in Canada, lauded for building something good in Canada, for all Canadians, is eventually found to have cursed out a left-handed albino otter one day on a Monday, and is thus Satan incarnate.
Here we chastise people in glass houses from throwing stones; but we also don’t respect a redemption story or long-lasting contributions in case Buddy had a bad day once.
JK Rowling.
Well when the preceding story is contingent on it leading to a satisfying conclusion, that being 99% of the shows I’ve seen critiqued this way… I’d say it’s a valid conclusion.
Like a punchline is to a joke, the ending is the most important part of a story. The conclusion gives the journey meaning. Blowing the ending can - and often does - retroactively ruin an entire narrative. This comic is akin to saying “a bad punchline doesn’t ruin a whole joke.” It does. In the same way, a bad or missing conclusion undermines the narrative as a whole.
This comic is out of touch with the politics of Netflix style script writing where there’s no story arc being followed.
If a show tells you it’s building to something, then fails to deliver, it has disrespected all the time and effort invested.
See:
Lost
Battlestar Galactica
How I Met Your MotherOr when it ends on a cliffhanger just to get canceled. That really ruins how I feel about a show.
A Person isn’t a story though the ending being rubbish rings the whole story
Disagreed, there are many shows that spend seasons building on the ending that if the ending is really bad, it makes the rest of the show feel pointless.
GoT comes to my mind with this. The whole show are these giant buildup to the war in the north, the dragons, Westeros power grabs, Jamie’s character arc, children of the forest, and other cool concepts that ended in a pathetic wet fart of a final season. It makes watching the show feel like a waste. when you know at the end its just a wet fart.
Grim comes to mind. It ended so abruptly I just regret watching it at all.
Really putting the “ass” in comparison there. Also, if a person say… wrote a best selling beloved children’s book series, but then heel-turned into a piece of shit, it absolutely does ruin their entire body of work for a lot of people.
Like, this happens, what is the comic even talking about?
Context can certainly change over time. If Rudy Giuliani died in 2002, he’d be remembered as ‘America’s Mayor’.
How cruel a joke it must be for a God to create beings that crave consistency in a universe where the only consistent thing is change.
Really feels like the comic artist wrote ‘died like an idiot’ to argue against himself in bad faith from the get go
What no? A show has a narrative structure - buildup to a disappointing end devalues all of that which came before.
A narrative and a person ain’t the same. It also follows that we evaluate them differently
We absolutely do apply these to people. Kevin Spacey? Bill Cosby? Jeffrey Epstein? Jared Fogle? Joe Paterno? Louis CK? Chris Brown? P. Diddy? Harvey Weinstein? OJ Simpson?
What if your achievements are mediocre and your views conform to the most popular, for your whole life.
Is that worthy of damnation?
This list is irrelevant. Most of these people’s lives didn’t end with their major controversies as the comic references.
“Too late, I’ve already drawn you as the soyjack”
